A non-self-adjoint Lebesgue decomposition

Abstract

We study the structure of bounded linear functionals on a class of non-self-adjoint operator algebras that includes the multiplier algebra of every complete Nevanlinna-Pick space, and in particular the multiplier algebra of the Drury-Arveson space. Our main result is a Lebesgue decomposition expressing every linear functional as the sum of an absolutely continuous (i.e. weak-* continuous) linear functional, and a singular linear functional that is far from being absolutely continuous. This is a non-self-adjoint analogue of Takesaki's decomposition theorem for linear functionals on von Neumann algebras. We apply our decomposition theorem to prove that the predual of every algebra in this class is (strongly) unique.